Armbian 24.8 has been released as the newest version of this Debian-based Linux distribution that began with a focus on ARM boards but has also expanded to include RISC-V as well as traditional x86_64 Intel/AMD systems too.

With the start of the new month comes the Steam Survey results for the month prior. The August 2024 data is in and it points to the Steam on Linux statistics dipping back below 2%.

Like with last week's Linux 6.11-rc5 release, Linux 6.11-rc6 is out a half-day early due to Linus Torvalds' ongoing foreign travels. Linux 6.11-rc6 brings many more fixes to this kernel that will debut as stable in mid-September,

August was a very busy month with the first AMD Ryzen 9000 series "Zen 5" desktop processors going on sale, finally having AmpereOne 192-core Arm processors in the lab, Linux kernel development continuing to advance at a brisk pace, and a variety of other interesting software and hardware milestones. On Phoronix for the month were 213 original news articles authored by me as well as another 20 Linux hardware reviews / featured-length articles.

Intel has released a new version of their open-source Video Processing Library (VPL) for hardware-accelerated video encode / decode / processing across Intel graphics hardware.

Arm engineer Mihail Atanassov proposed a set of "request for comments" patches this week for adding user submission support to the Panthor DRM driver that is used for handling newer Arm Mali graphics under Linux. This would allow user-space more easily to submit work directly to the GPU hardware without kernel intervention for better performance and management capabilities.

FreeBSD 13.4 is due out in just over one week's time while this weekend brought FreeBSD 13.4-RC2 as the last planned test candidate.

Debian 12.7 is out today as the latest stable release update for the Debian Bookworm series.

The Rust-based, open-source Servo web engine had a very eventful month as the developers involved continue advancing this browser engine as well as their example/reference web browser.

This week's batch of power management fixes for the Linux 6.11 kernel are just a set of three patches for AMD processors.

A new AVX2 code path for FFmpeg's VVC decoding "vvcdec" is helping provide significant speed-ups for CPU-based H.266 decoding.

Jonas Ådahl released Wayland-Protocols 1.37 as the newest update to this defined set of Wayland protocols. With the new release there are three new protocols added plus various other maintenance items addressed within the Wayland-Protocols repository.

Plasma 6.2 this week entered its soft feature freeze ahead of the Plasma 6.2 stable release in October. The focus now is on bug-fixing for Plasma 6.2 and at the moment they are at 301 bug reports, which is their lowest amount going back to 2015. The KDE developers hope over the next month to drop that to less than 200 bug reports.

Following the pull request from earlier this week that enables Intel Xe2 Lunar Lake and Battlemage graphics by default for Linux 6.12, a final set of feature updates for the Intel kernel graphics driver have been submitted ahead of this next kernel cycle.

Following last week's Vulkan 1.3.294 with pipeline binary extension, Vulkan 1.3.295 is out today and it too introduces a prominent new extension.

Microsoft engineers continue contributing to the open-source Mesa graphics driver code for benefiting Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) usage and other related use atop Windows 11. The latest contribution to Mesa is wiring up direct DPB management for the D3D12 video acceleration code.

The Wine project has released VKD3D 1.13 as the newest version of this open-source code for mapping Microsoft's Direct3D 12 API atop the Vulkan API for helping to accelerate Windows games and applications on Linux.

While all of the focus recently when it comes to Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver has been around getting Lunar Lake and Battlemage graphics ready, there is an important last-minute fix that is also needed for ensuring Arrow Lake graphics support is ready for Linux users.

Longtime Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem maintainer David Airlie of Red Hat has written an interesting blog post providing an analogy to types of developers compared to road builders and hotels.

Even before the Bcachefs file-system driver was accepted into the mainline kernel, Debian for the past five years has offered a "bcachefs-tools" package to provide the user-space programs to this copy-on-write file-system. It was simple at first when it was simple C code but since the Bcachefs tools transitioned to Rust, it's become an unmaintainable mess for stable-minded distribution vendors. As such the bcachefs-tools package has now been orphaned by Debian.